The haunted house

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The Haunted House is the debut novel by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende . Thework published in 1982 with the original title La casa de los espíritus (German publication 1984, Frankfurt am Main) tells the story of a wealthy upper-class family in an unnamed Latin American country that is very clearly recognizable as Chile . The background of the novel, which has clear historical and also autobiographical references, is the history of Chile from the turn of the 20th century to the years of the military dictatorship after the 1973 coup in Chile against Salvador Allende , who was a distant uncle of the novelist. The novel is assigned to magical realism .

Table of contents

The focus of the story is Clara del Valle, who turns out to be the narrator's grandmother at the end of the novel , and her husband Esteban Trueba. At the beginning of the novel there are childhood experiences of the protagonist, in which her unusual supernatural talents and perceptions play a role. It anticipates disasters and can move objects without touching them. Similar skills and experiences are later important for the lives of her daughter Blanca and her granddaughter Alba.

As a young man from an impoverished middle class, Esteban falls in love with the beautiful and silent Rosa del Valle, Clara's older sister, who is surrounded by a mysterious aura. To his great surprise, she agrees to marry. Esteban goes to the north of the country in order to earn the necessary money for the marriage in the mines . He writes fiery love letters to Rosa, who stays with her family in the capital.

While Esteban's absence, Rosa dies of the consequences of an unfortunate poisoning by rat poison that was supposed to poison her father Severo, who was running for the Liberal Party in the Senate elections. Rosa's sister Clara had foreseen the accident and is also secretly watching the opening of Rosa's body, which is being dissected on the family's kitchen table to determine the cause of death. The girl, who until then was considered cheerful and cheeky, reacted to the incident with nine years of silence. Neither the doctors nor the family's nanny , Nana , with whom Clara has a lifelong relationship of trust, manage to get her to speak again.

In order to flee from the mourning for Rosa, but also from the responsibility for his seriously ill mother, Esteban Trueba goes south to the country, where he begins to run up the estate Drei Marien . He turns the completely ailing company into a model good and is known for his love of order and efficiency as well as for his irascibility and the brutal treatment of the workers and Inquilinos . He habitually raped the daughters of the estate's inhabitants and had countless illegitimate descendants who would later populate the estate.

Clara breaks her nine-year silence as a young woman and announces that she will get married. In fact, Esteban Trueba comes to her parents' house shortly afterwards and asks for her hand. Shortly before, his mother died and he had promised her that the family would continue to exist. The wedding of Clara and Esteban is celebrated with great pomp, and Esteban builds a prestigious house in the capital, which Clara and her sister-in-law Férula live in and manage. Férula is an unmarried sister of Esteban and until then had taken care of the sick mother. The Nana remains as a housekeeper for the family and is always in Clara's environment. While Esteban goes back to the country and spends most of the time in Drei Marien , Clara devotes herself to spiritualistic activities and gathers a circle of like-minded people who meet regularly in the villa.

Clara and Esteban have three children: the daughter Blanca and the twins Jaime and Nicolas. The family spends every summer on the Drei Marien and winters in the capital. The marriage between Clara and Esteban looks happy on the outside, but is made more difficult by Férula's jealousy.

As a small child, Blanca met the son of the administrator of the Three Marys , Pedro Tercero García. As adolescents, the two fall passionately in love with each other, but the relationship is not tolerated by the Patriarch Esteban, as Blanca's social position does not allow any connection with servants. Esteban threatens to kill Pedro several times, but does not do so, among other things out of consideration for Pedro Tercero's father, Pedro Segundo García, who is a loyal and efficient steward of the estate. Pedro Tercero's grandfather, Pedro García the Old, had also saved Esteban's life after an earthquake in the early days.

Pedro Tercero joins the Communist Party and has to leave Drei Marien . After seeing them again, Blanca becomes pregnant by Pedro, whereupon Esteban reacts with an outburst of anger and knocks out several teeth of his wife, whom Blanca had taken protection from. Clara separates from her husband forever and never speaks a word to him again, even on her deathbed. Esteban tries to track down Pedro Tercero and persecutes him relentlessly; when attacked with an ax, the young man loses three fingers. The pregnant Blanca is married against her will to the French Jean de Satigny, an industrialist who was courted as an investor and who had been a guest on the estate for some time. She moves him to the north of the country, but soon discovers that her husband is taking sexually offensive photos with young male domestic workers. She then flees back to her parents' house in the capital.

Blanca gives birth to a daughter named Alba. She is the only one who manages to develop sensible relationships with all family members, especially with her uncle Nicolas, an adventurer whose economic projects almost all end in a fiasco. Nicolas later joins an Asian sect and is eventually sent to North America by his father because his behavior embarrasses Esteban and endangers his political ambitions. Alba's second uncle Jaime becomes a doctor and works under great hardship in a poor hospital in the capital.

Esteban Trueba goes into politics and is elected senator for the Conservative Party several times. He develops a great aversion to the left and regards his children, who are dedicated to charity and some of whom are also politically active, as useless failures. Trueba invests large sums of money in his political career while providing only the essentials for his abandoned daughter Blanca.

After Clara's death, the family falls apart and the big house begins to fall apart. Some family members still live in the same house, but they have grown apart so much that they no longer even eat together. Alba begins to study music and philosophy at the university. Your studies come at a time when the country is politically deeply divided. She falls in love with the socialist Miguel, who is ready to join the guerrilla and fight for his ideals. More out of love for him than out of enthusiasm for the cause, Alba participates in a university occupation that turns out to be very dangerous for those involved.

The further developments in the country lead Esteban Trueba politically and economically on the sidelines. His party loses the elections and the left takes power. Trueba's estate is expropriated against his resistance and he subsequently participates in plans for a violent overthrow. The country's economy is systematically destabilized by the property owners in order to damage the left-wing government. Esteban Trueba's personal enemy Pedro Tercero García, who has worked his way up to a popular singer since his mutilation, becomes a minister of the left-wing government.

A little later there is a military coup. Esteban's son Jaime, a friend of the President, is present at the bombing of the Presidential Palace and is later arrested, tortured and murdered by the military. Esteban had expected the military to restore order and call new elections. Instead, a terror regime is being set up that threatens numerous people from Esteban's circle of friends and acquaintances. Esteban reconciles with Blanca and Pedro Tercero and helps them leave the country and go into exile together to Canada. However, he initially considers reports of torture and concentration camps to be communist propaganda.

When Alba is arrested in the middle of the night, taken to a concentration camp, tortured and abused, her grandfather realizes his mistake. With the help of an acquaintance, Tránsito Soto, who runs a noble brothel in the city and was Esteban's lover for years, he succeeds in an adventurous way to free Alba from the clutches of the torturers. The head of the torture unit and personal torturer of Albas is the police colonel Esteban García, the first son whom Esteban Trueba had when he rape the young Pancha García, a sister of the future manager Pedro Segundo García and aunt of Pedro Tercero, after his arrival at Drei Marien . Esteban García is Alba's uncle and had secretly observed and followed her and her mother Blanca, his half-sister, for years.

Esteban Trueba begins to write the family history with Clara's help. She lovingly accompanies her husband as a ghost during the last years of his life , after he has gradually completely lost the quick temper that characterizes him for life. After having written down many pages from his memory himself, Esteban died in his sleep at the age of ninety while his granddaughter was sitting by his bed. Alba continues her grandfather's work and completes the story.

annotation

The names of the main female characters - Nívea (mother of Clara), Clara, Blanca and Alba - all mean "white".

Success of the German translation

The German translation of Das Geisterhaus comes from Anneliese Botond . The book was number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list for 29 weeks in 1984 and 1985 . In 1987, Gottfried Honnefelder , then managing director at Suhrkamp Verlag , reported that the volume had sold a very high 500,000 copies. The 32nd edition of the German edition was reached in 1987.

A deviation of the German translation from the Spanish source text is that Botond explicitly mentions the country "Chile" as the setting of the story in several places, while Allende left the name of the country unnamed in her work, despite clear indirect recognizability in numerous details.

filming

The Danish director Bille August filmed the haunted house in 1993 with Jeremy Irons , Meryl Streep , Winona Ryder , Glenn Close and Antonio Banderas . In some places the plot of the film differs from that of the book. The main difference lies in the change in the succession of generations, which merges the characters Blanca and Alba. The twin brothers Jaime and Nicolas and Alba's friend Miguel are also missing from the screen story (his experiences are assigned to Pedro). The Alba from the film version is still a child during the coup; Instead, her mother Blanca is arrested and tortured. In the film adaptation, she takes on the role of narrator instead of Alba.

Theater adaptation

The first performance of the dramatization of the novel took place on January 30, 2014 in the Akademietheater (Vienna) . Directed by Antú Romero Nunes , who also created the text version together with Florian Hirsch .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b In the German novel version "Chile" is explicitly mentioned several times, while in the original Spanish version it always only says "the country" in the relevant places. So on pages 42, 79, 140, 185 and 229 of the novel, the German and Spanish versions of which are paginated in almost the same way .
  2. ↑ Ulrich Greiner : A thoroughly dubious business . In: Die Zeit (25/1987), July 17, 1987.